Op Ed

Game|Life
- Why Videogames Should Be Played With Friends, Not Online With Strangers.“There’s something super addictive and super satisfying about just
sitting down with your friends and having that real-world experience,” he
says. “I think a lot of the times people play Cards, they have this great
time and they often attribute it to the game, but it’s really just that the
game was the pretext for them to sit down and have this real world
interaction.”

Wilson hopes Sportsfriends will similarly act as a “Trojan horse” that gets
gamers back into the living room, socializing in person, recapturing the
magic of the offline games he played in his youth.

Feminist Frequency Women as Background Decoration – Tropes vs Women.
Thanks Ant via
Boing Boing.In this episode we explore the Women as Background Decoration trope which
is the subset of largely insignificant non-playable female characters whose
sexuality or victimhood is exploited as a way to infuse edgy, gritty or racy
flavoring into game worlds. These sexually objectified female bodies are
designed to function as environmental texture while titillating presumed
straight male players. Sometimes they’re created to be glorified furniture
but they are frequently programmed as minimally interactive sex objects to
be used and abused.